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The New Yorker
Uncrazy California
By Hendrik
Hertzberg
November 17, 2003
On Monday of this week, for the first time in
television (and American) history, a gubernatorial inauguration is
to be carried live and coast to coast on all three networks—CNN,
MSNBC, and FNC. Network TV ain’t what it used to be. Still, this is
a notable first. Even in California, it isn’t every day that so
singular a figure as Arnold Schwarzenegger is solemnly invested with
supreme executive power, especially under such astonishing
circumstances.
The rest of the country got a lot of derisive laughs out of the
California recall election. It provoked a few rueful chuckles in the
Golden State, too. Viewed strictly as a process, though, it
functioned remarkably well. And the transition, which many people
quite reasonably expected to be bumpy and rancorous, was smooth and
collegial. The involuntarily outgoing governor, Gray Davis, had
every right to feel bitter at getting the boot just eleven months
after being reëlected. If he had gone all sullen and uncoöperative,
that would have been only human (a category he has always had
trouble fitting into, poor guy). But he was the soul of graciousness
after his defeat; and Schwarzenegger, of course, is a genial fellow.
Perhaps the biggest reason for the smoothness of the transition,
though, was that Schwarzenegger had won the election so convincingly
that no one could quibble about the legitimacy of his right to the
office.
The size and clarity of the victory came as a surprise. The most
glaring flaw in the design of the recall process is the danger of a
grossly undemocratic outcome. A two-part ballot—thumbs up or thumbs
down on the incumbent, and then, if it’s thumbs down, the awarding
of the job to the first-place plurality winner among, in this case,
a hundred and thirty-five replacement candidates—created the
mathematical possibility of an election in which the loser outpolls
the winner by better than fifty to one. “If Davis is recalled,” the
columnist George F. Will predicted, “he probably will be replaced by
a governor who received substantially fewer votes than were cast
against the recall.” Many observers agreed—me, for example. (In a
dispatch from California for this magazine, I confidently called
that outcome “a near-certainty.”) These predictions were, to put it
mildly, wrong. On October 7th, Schwarzenegger got 4,203,596 votes,
or 48.6 per cent of the total. This was more than the vote for
retaining Davis (4,006,021, or 44.6 per cent), much more than the
vote for Schwarzenegger’s nearest rival, Lieutenant Governor Cruz
Bustamente (2,723,768, or 31.5 per cent), and more, even, than the
vote for Davis in the last regular election (3,469,025, or 47.4 per
cent). Nor did the California recall have the undemocratic taint of
the 2000 Presidential election, in which, on top of Al Gore’s
half-million-vote plurality over George W. Bush, left-of-center
candidates outpolled right-of-center ones, fifty-one to forty-nine
per cent. In California, Republicans of various stripes amassed well
over sixty per cent.
Governor Davis and his supporters portrayed the recall as a
cynical attempt to overturn a democratic election, likening it not
only to Florida in 2000 but also to the Clinton impeachment and this
year’s Republican redistricting coup in Texas. The public, rightly,
found these parallels unconvincing. It’s one thing to overturn an
election by means of a judicial ukase, a partisan parody of a trial,
or an orgy of gerrymandering. It’s another to overturn an election
by means of another election. The recall did indeed originate as a
cynical Republican power grab—and it ended as one, in that
Republicans have now grabbed power in Sacramento. But along the way
it also turned out to be a pretty good exercise in American
democracy. The attention of the public and the press was riveted,
even before Schwarzenegger entered the race. The issues got a
thorough airing. And voter turnout was high—twenty per cent higher
than in the regular gubernatorial election the year before.
In the early stages of the recall campaign, it wasn’t just
partisan Democrats who grumbled that the whole process was
inherently mischievous. George Will called it “vandalism.” The
Washington Post’s David S. Broder, the Yoda of the political
press corps, called it a “perversion of representative government.”
In the wake of Schwarzenegger’s victory, talk of actually repealing
the recall provision of the California constitution—which was added
in 1911 and until this year had never been used against a statewide
official—has died away. But there is a move afoot to tinker with it.
Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Democratic state legislator from Los Angeles,
is pushing an amendment that would eliminate the replacement ballot,
letting the lieutenant governor take over after a successful recall.
It’s a well-meaning proposal, but its main effect, besides robbing
the process of much of its interest, would be to turn a recall into
a face-off between two incumbents, the governor and the lieutenant
governor, who in California are separately elected.
Here’s a better way: choose the replacement not by plurality but
by instant runoff voting. Under I.R.V., a voter lists as many
candidates as he or she wishes in order of preference. In the
counting, the electoral computer drops the least popular candidates,
one by one, and instantly recounts the votes for the candidates who
remain until one of them accumulates an outright majority. That way,
the booby trap of the existing recall process—the strong possibility
that an incumbent who is unacceptable to a small majority will get
traded in for a challenger who is unacceptable to a large
majority—would be eliminated, while its advantages would be left
intact. (Under I.R.V., by the way, Schwarzenegger would still have
won. He would have received fewer first-place votes, but the instant
runoffs would probably have ended up giving him a two-to-one
majority.)
A recall election like California’s is exciting, dramatic, and
fun, with or without an action star heading the cast.
(Schwarzenegger boycotted the campaign’s kickoff TV debate, but it
scored high in the ratings anyway.) The heavy media attention
somewhat reduces the importance of paid advertising and, therefore,
of money. Voter turnout soars. Because there are multiple candidates
instead of just two, mudslinging, which discredits the slinger as
well as the spattered, is riskier; and, because the range of views
on offer is wider, debate is livelier. This recall was a
Technicolor, special-effects-crammed, Austro-American version of a
British snap election. It featured the populist equivalent of a vote
of no confidence, and the campaign, like campaigns in Britain, was
blessedly short—just eighty days, still plenty of time to allow
voters to make an informed choice without forcing them to make
politics a way of life. Add the I.R.V. tweak, and the California
circus would be a model for us all. |
